Sky Sports push back the boundaries with their TV cricketing marathon, testing staying power to the full

The marathon began with a West Indies v Zimbabwe Test on Thursday lunchtime,
before it was time for a quick ice bath ahead of day two of New Zealand and
England from 9pm, then an isotonic recovery HobNob and some gentle
stretching to prepare for day one of India v Australia in the hours before
dawn.

By the time of Friday’s midday appointment with a South Africa v Pakistan ODI, viewers were hitting their stride, coasting nicely into day three of the England Test in the evening.

It’s exhausting just reading about it, huh?

The 39 hours of continuous cricket coverage on Sky Sports 1 last week packed in much that is good and bad about following the sport in 2013. Among the negatives, a travelling team just making up the numbers in the first Test of a series (not England on this occasion) with the West Indies dispatching Zimbabwe just after lunch on day three in Barbados.

This did, though, allow for one of sport’s enduring bittersweet pleasures, with the UK viewer given the opportunity to watch Tony Cozier on the lives of the Saints of the Caribbean, and hear an anecdote about the teenaged Everton Weekes climbing over the wall in Bridgetown to help the groundstaff and so watch cricket for free. One wonders how many more generations in the West Indies will be producing such stories.

England next. For this viewer, the return of Bob Willis to the front rank of Sky commentators has been a highlight of the sporting winter. Nobody pronounces on an England batting collapse with quite the same withering, icy fury as Bob. The team obliged in the first Test, but the second found the big man in mellow mood: tales of Bob Dylan concerts, stats about the world’s windiest cities, ornithological diversions about the week’s breakout TV star, the Paradise Shelduck that stationed itself at extra cover at the Basin Reserve.

“The female has a white head,” advised Bob. “But we turn most females grey in the end.”

A bird of Bob’s vintage showing no sign of yielding to time’s march is Sir Ian Botham. Like us mortals, Sir Ian was denied the chance for a proper point-and-laugh at Australia on day one of their Test against India, which was rained off in Mohali. He did, however, pepper his week’s commentary with gleeful derision of that unhappy cricket team’s technocratic nincompoopery. “A form asking how much sleep you got during a match?” hooted Sir Ian. “Sleep?!”

Viewers adopting the Botham approach to shut-eye pressed on with a South Africa v Pakistan ODI at noon on Friday. The rain had a say in this one as well, but viewers did hear Dominic Cork offer a tart critique of certain, sadly unnamed, former England cricketers in the Sky studio who slate the current team while forgetting how they themselves struggled.

Rainy Johannesburg was soon forgotten and it was time for an intriguing Friday night intergenerational difference of opinion with Paul Collingwood and Steve Harmison on one side and Sir Ian and Bob on the other.

The heroes of Headingley 1981 thought England bowled too short in the Kiwi first innings. Standard. But it was interesting to hear the recent vintage players counter by endorsing the team’s tactics.

Harmison approved of the “brutal” bowling. Collingwood said: “I have come out of international cricket two years. I remember waiting to bat watching the likes of Siddle and Johnson, thinking ‘this looks pretty hairy, this is quick’. Believe me, if you are thinking a bowler can hit you in the head, you are not going to get forward.”

This sort of personal, even self-effacing insight from recently active players forms a welcome counterpoint to the more familiar viewing experience of the heroes of 40 years ago reciting the game’s ancient commandments. The game may be the game, but it is changing all the time, as illustrated by Michael Atherton’s interview query of Kevin Pietersen about his form on this tour.

With some feeling, Kevin said: “You can’t identify tour by tour in the current way we play. I have been playing non-stop cricket, apart from 2½ weeks, since September. I don’t talk tour by tour, I talk Test match by Test match.”

The viewer, coming to the end of 39 hours of cricket featuring eight different teams, could surely sympathise.